8 de julio de 2016

Parallax Paradox, Joan Leandre (2009-2014)
(Spain, digital video, colour, sound)English version:
In the field of analogue photography a slight defect exists associated with instant
cameras but sorted out by reflex cameras. The parallax error is a difference between the
image seen in the viewfinder and the composition delineated by the lens which shapes
the final image. A set of mirrors collocated inside the reflex camera body avoids this
small displacement of the selected frame allowing the photographer to balance the limits
configured by the image. This effect is analysed in Parallax Paradox, one of the most
recent projects by Joan Leandre. It has been years since this Catalan video creator has
been recycling audiovisual materials of diverse origins to reinsert them into an artistic
sphere after distorting their contents. The aim of these modifications is to question the
propagandistic power, ideological force and capacity for seduction of the capitalist
imagery of the mass media.

Parallax Paradox (2009-2014) is made up of a collection of videos which rearrange
various shots extracted from YouTube with a view to transforming their synergy. And
they do so conveying new ideas redirected now towards the comprehension of their
mechanisms of fascination. Leandre himself explains conceptually the nexus of the
videos in the following way: “Indeed, it is all about the idea of optical, astronomical
parallax; a slight displacement of the viewer entails a transformation of the meaning of
the observed object, very often in a radical way.” According to Leandre, the pieces the
collection comprises “are exploration work in an age of excess, seeking the essential
mystery occurring between the frames.” Parallax Paradox is an unfinished series whose
subtitle reads: “Eyes wide open looking for the final image to overshadow the world.”

In the nineteen pieces of work the project currently consists of, slight sound
modifications, insightful parallel montages along with antagonistic conclusions offer
new perspectives on possible readings of the original materials: After Picture (2014)
reflects on the divergence existing between pictorial oil practice and the production of
technological images explaining how to paint; Visual Nation (2014) shows the digital
generation being slave to the necessity of capturing and sharing everything that is
experimented first-hand; After Mystery (2014) visualizes magnetic spheres levitating
over superconductors which problematise the viewer’s disbelief; Wonder Mirage
Global (2013) exposes a dangerous attraction towards an advanced technical
development existing in devices designed for possessive or even violent purposes;
Inside Surface (2013) meditates upon the sublime featuring natural enclaves that
surpass, in terms of magnitude and transcendence, dimensions of man; and finally,
Beyond Multiplicity (2013) exemplifies many of Leandre’s anxieties when starting with
a sentence by Indian teacher H. W. L. Poonja, known as Papaji, which reads as follows:
“Consciousness alone is the substratum of the universe.”

Papaji’s wish to teach through silence to the detriment of words is a posture Leandre
places in the foreground when structuring his productions as free formulations from
which evocations emerge unveiling unusual points of view, recalling echoes of spiritual
background. His unsettling video-graphic constructions are available online on a
domain (retroyou.org) full of surprising itineraries of numerous findings. This is the
case of the productions made together with Polish artist Maya Wolinska: five
mysteriously contemplative video recordings that make up the series Sounds from the
Vast Chasmseries (2013-2014). They are all astounding when manifesting themselves
subtly by means of heuristic strategies.
Versión en español:

6 de julio de 2016

YouTube is a gold mine. No one doubts this. It is a colossal web containing sounds and
images in motion of practically anything everything you can imagine and more. For
some directors who specialize in editing appropriated material, this platform turns into
an immense library of digital video-graphic materials disposed to be altered under
aesthetic criteria based on theoretical foundations (or the other way round).
Appropriation artists with discursive purposes, who exhibit their critical attitudes
towards the media, such as Jennifer Proctor, Oliver Laric or Cory Arcangel, have
specialized in (dis)assembling YouTube clips. They have been doing so, with a view to
emphasizing the relevance of these contents in the identification processes of their users
or highlighting their powerful influence on the configuration of reality.

Since 2012 young Argentinean filmmaker Florencia Aliberti has also been working with
videos downloaded from this popular media support combining them with dozens of her
own shots of anonymous faces—mainly Anglo-Saxon teenagers—recorded with
webcams in order to promote folk wisdom advice or seek out approving answers in the
cloud. Her work in progress takes the form of a multifaceted project titled
(Self)exhibitions, which manifests the alarming repetition observed in some Internet
users’ behaviour—many of whom have light-weight personalities. Up to this point in
time the series (Self)exhibitions consists of seven pieces: Am I? (2012), Daily Routine
(2012), Watch Me Shrink (2014), Coming out (2015), Packers (2015), Bind (2015) and
Cosplay (2015). Collectively they last approximately half an hour.

The treatment of privacy constitutes the dialectical centrepiece of these seven revealing
productions performed by a connected series of talking heads exhibiting vital, genuinely
similar, moments. They do so, so as to question their beauty, offer make-up tutorials,
instruct how to showcase women’s breasts, recommend some strategies to simulate
mighty male attributes, or demonstrate the lack of understanding of their progenitors
when disclosing their homosexuality. Aliberti suggests different interpretations of the
consequences of addressing the camera from the private sphere connected to a public,
global in scope, area, as is the World Wide Web. The exhibition of the face and the
body in the domestic habitat is the lowest common denominator of these pieces edited
as a repetitive multiplication of mimetic gestures: equivalent verbalizations, shown
methodically, visualized in the form of a puzzle. Such cacophonies of performative
monologues, meticulously reused, skew the sphere from which they originate in order to
relocate themselves as critically devastating video creation pieces. According to
Aliberti, these (dis)assemblies “are personal experiences mediated by the public screen
operating as a kind of a mirror in which thousands of people contemplate their image
and replicate ways of behaving, forms, poses and habits.” By placing them again in the
web as kaleidoscopic representations of identical gestures, their author displays a
discursive repertoire evidenced by the accumulation.
Finally, presenting these works in festivals (in single-channel format) or artistic spaces
(shown as looped video installations) lets the artist approach a different kind of viewer;
the one who, in public cultural contexts, is driven to decipher the reason for the shots’
origin from a critical position. An urge to convey domestic findings along with a desire
to receive recognition might constitute some of the answers that justify the video clips
which, presented in unison, reverence the emergence of new digital media as tools to
speculate about the existence itself.Versión en español:

3 de julio de 2016

English version:
On the 20th of October 2011, English poet Ross Sutherland finds a VHS tape in his
attic. While viewing on his television monitor the audiovisual fragments of this
magnetic tape he realizes how closely this material is linked to and intertwined with his
entire life’s journey. This discovery, coupled with his melancholic mood caused by the
recent death of his grandfather, with whom he would watch those TV materials when he
was a boy, triggers the accumulation of memories which he decides to articulate through
an autobiographical monologue. The contents of that plastic artefact become a creative
stimulus for him to initiate an intimate journey, both delirious and captivating, which
turns into a personal voyage of universal resonance.

By simulating continued viewing of one reproduction—rewound dozens of times in
specific sections—Sutherland elaborates on the nature of images by means of an
analytical, frenetically overwhelming recitation. The musicality transmitted by his
voice-over discourse reaches spoken word parts punctuated by intermittent rapping. Its
accelerated rhythm implies the presence of semantic links with the visualized, giving
rise to suggestively constructed synchronies. It is in these moments of visual and sound
alignment when the author, being both writer and singer, suggests a film arrangement
close to an audio commentary by an expert—an often underrated resource typical of
certain DVD editions. But what is analyzed here is not a full-length fiction film. Here
one talks about oneself—in the first person, with an extreme sincerity, describing
depressive situations in an ironic manner so as to give way to a clarity that eradicates
anxieties themselves. As Sutherland states himself, not only does he make
commentaries on video, but he also reflects upon previous commentaries, which helps
him heighten the symmetry and synchrony of the whole film.

A plethora of words is supported by an accumulation of prosaic fragments, thereby
shaping a divergent collage of audiovisual documents shown repeatedly. These
sequences are varied in origin and have been collected during TV broadcasts in the
nineties. The footage begins with a scene from The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming,
1945) in which Dorothy’s stroll is accompanied by the first track from The Dark Side of
the Moon (Pink Floyd, 1973)—just as the well-known, popular myth recommended. On
the other hand, a terrifying sequence from Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984)—with
Bill Murray thunderstruck by a greenish, amorphous stain frozen for several minutes—
lets the artist recount his first film memory. The opening credits of the series The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air (1990-96), a bland bank advert, a laughable TV contest with obstacles
and platforms, brief football match intervals instantly coiled, the video clip Thriller
(John Landis, 1983) by Michael Jackson and the first scenes of Jaws (Steven Spielberg,
1975) are all dissected scrupulously in the form of a verbalized essay pertaining to both
the expressive and the cognitive sphere.

Reflecting upon these recovered and appropriated images Sutherland evokes the
canonical film of experimental cinema, Standard Gauge (1984) by Morgan Fisher. In
this film the North American filmmaker describes dozens of 35mm film cuts placed in
front of the camera to pin down the idiosyncrasy of the standard format of the film
industry. In the documentary titled Every Rendition on a Broken Machine (Ross
Sutherland, 2011) Sutherland introduces another type of recycling procedure
ingeniously raising a question whether computers are able to write poetry.

1 de julio de 2016

English version:
It has been about thirty years since filmmaker Steve Woloshen started experimenting
with handmade, cameraless film techniques producing abstract animation drawn onto
celluloid. His film output is one of the most extensive and prolific filmographies in such
a specific field as cameraless cinema. The filmmaking trajectory of this Montreal born
artist has been developing alongside his pedagogical occupation concentrated upon
countless workshops persistently organised in various film schools, festivals and art
centres. Woloshen has combined his instructional job with writing in which he discusses
visual possibilities of analogue film formats as a support for a personal cinematic
expression. After publishing Recipes for Reconstruction: The Cookbook for the Frugal
Filmmaker in 2010 – where he explored the decay of film emulsion and its aesthetic
potentialities for creating moving images – now, in his latest book, Scratch, Crackle & Pop!, he exhibits his knowledge of numerous cameraless filmmaking techniques
exemplified by his own films.

As a result, this self-published volume of 106 pages shares an artisan know-how that
encourages the readers to implement the avant-garde animation resources. And it does
so by virtue of being conceived as a practical guidebook whose instructions are aimed
to raise visually-based artistic concerns and interests by means of precise explanations
suitably accompanied by photographic material. In order to define thoroughly the
experimental handmade strategies he has been putting into practice over the course of
his filmmaking career, the author focuses his attention on three lines of action: one
explores the techniques of scratching on film, another enables to paint the celluloid, and
the third one combines the other two opening new perspectives ranging from a collage
to the use of numerous tricks revelead intuitively on the basis of a trial/error. By having
divided the volume into three distinctive sections, Woloshen starts from the general
framework and proceeds to immerse himself in the specific observations. Describing the
basic tools used for scratching, tearing, drawing, painting, colouring, altering, cutting
out and sticking on opaque or transparent film, the filmmaker remarks on the practical
solutions he has been finding out when dealing with his own pieces of work. In this
way, these three sections are perfectly analyzed following a string of case studies
featuring the thirteen films on a DVD included with the book.

When viewing these films, one catches a glimpse of the influences Woloshen has
received from both New Zealand artist Len Lye and Canadian animator Norman
McLaren: a stroke of expressionist abstraction in the play of patches together with a naïf
tone in the linear solutions. Amongst all the added pieces the confluence of visual
compositions of vibrant colours and jazzy arrangements of acoustic instrumentation and
frenzy rhythms is particularly interesting. Cool jazz is a music genre which finds its
supreme representation in a fever of blinking forms in coincidental synchronies with the
piano notes by Dave Brubeck (Cameras Take Five, 2003) and Oscar Peterson
(Playtime, 2009), or the vibrophone notes by Lionel Hampton (1000 Plateaus, 2004-
2014).

Numerous black and white photographies, colour frames, the two 35 mm film fragments
expressly added on page 18 and, above all, the DVD contents make Scratch, Crackle & Pop! a highly recommendable publication both for the neophytes and the well versed in
the subject area. The latter will get hold of an extra reference text discussing the
possibilities of the cameraless cinema, which deserves to be placed beside the manual
Recipes for disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet (compiled by the late American
animator Helen Hill) or the exhibition catalogue Zelluloid (held at Schirn Kunsthalle,
Frankfurt in 2010) which included pieces of work by such artists as Stan Brakhage, José
Antonio Sistiaga, Emmanuel Lefrant and Jennifer West, amongst others.